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Arctic Monkey slammed for ‘synchronized’ live shows

ARCTIC MONKEYS:British rockers Arctic Monkeys have been slammed for their "synchronized" live performances by their tour mates The Orwells.
Photo: Associated Press

British rockers Arctic Monkeys have been slammed for their “synchronized” live performances by their tour mates The Orwells.

The BRIT Award winners were joined by the U.S. band for a number of shows on their U.S. trek earlier this year and the up-and-coming American group was given an insight into how the headliners put their concerts together.

Now guitarist Matt O’Keefe has accused Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner of planning his seemingly spontaneous comments to the crowd and performing the same routine each night.

O’Keefe tells Gigwise.com, “When you’re playing arenas and everything, it’s a huge production then the show has to become synchronized to work… So every night no matter how he was feeling he’d go into that opening riff. It was the exact same ad-libs he was putting between the songs. So we were with them for about 50 dates, you saw them once and you’d pretty much seen every date that they’d played.”

Singer Mario Cuomo adds, “You can reach that level without turning into that. Like Nirvana played bigger (expletive) than that and I’m sure it wasn’t like that and it’s probably a different show every night. You don’t have to take that route, you can get that level of success with those size venues, that sort of thing but still treat it as a spontaneous show at a small club. So it all just depends on the band, what they’re going for and what they feel comfortable with. Like I would feel super uncomfortable if I knew what I was going to say in between songs.”